


A Good Dog

by lovetincture



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Intimacy, M/M, nonsexual petplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:47:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23307796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Will Graham is just looking for peace.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 22
Kudos: 105





	A Good Dog

The first time, he’s just trying to make a skittish new dog feel more at home. She’s thin and ragged, an indeterminate color under all the muck. He finds her in the brush behind his house, scraggly and clinging to the edges. He thinks she’s a coyote at first.

She growls every time he comes near, so he finds a clear patch of dirt to sit on, never mind that he’s still in his work pants. He sits very still and holds his hand out.

Eventually, slowly—so slowly it’s like listening for grass to grow—she inches closer. It probably takes hours. By the time she sniffs his hand, giving a tentative lick and looking up at him with those baleful honey eyes, the sun is burning the sky pink and orange.

She’s terrified of everything. He gets her in the house, but it’s days before she lets him get close enough to touch her, a week before he can manage to get her in a bath. She’s brindle colored under the grime. She snaps at him when he accidentally pulls on her fur trying to work the burrs free.

He’s just trying to make her feel more comfortable.

It just seems like a natural thing to do, to get down on his hands and knees and crawl to her. She wriggles a little, her tail lashing from side to side—it’s tentative, but it’s a wag; he’ll take it. He curls up next to her in front of the heater. She looks at him for a moment, calculating the odds probably, in her canine brain. She decides to trust him, in the end. She fits herself against him, curling up against his belly. He can feel her warmth through his shirt.

He smiles down at her, and she tucks her chin on her paws, whuffing softly.

He lies there until he falls asleep. The days have been long and not particularly kind. He wakes up once in the night to find that the rest of his dogs have piled in around him, filling the empty spaces. He feels hemmed in on all sides, trapped snug in a tide of warm, furry bodies. The air smells faintly of unwashed dog and popcorn. He smiles a little, goes back to sleep, and dreams of nothing at all.

The habit grows from there. She’s nervous of his hands. He thinks her last owner probably hit her, but she doesn’t mind if he plays with his teeth. He buys a new toy for them to share, a long, thick length of white rope that’s knotted at either end.

He takes it out of the bag when he gets home, balling the plastic up and tossing it in the cabinet where he keeps the rest of the plastic bags. He puts his keys on the counter, takes off his jacket and tie, and gets down to play. He crawls over to her on his hands and knees, dangling the toy from his mouth.

He shakes it a little, waving it in front of her face and making a little growling noise that she seems to like. Her ears perk up and she lowers her front paws, wiggling and barking before bounding forward. He pulls the toy back, teasing, and she chases him, wagging and barking all the while.

He doesn’t even have to let her win. She wins all on her own, and he’s proud of her for it. He’s considerably less agile than a dog, hampered by fingers with too many joints and creaky knees that don’t bend right for this kind of play, but they make it work. She latches onto the other end of the rope with sharp, pearly teeth, and Will pulls. She growls, and Will growls back. It’s something like the kind of wrestling Will imagines other kids did with their siblings—the kind that ended with laughter and popsicles, not bloody noses while some schoolyard bully ran off with his lunch money.

He lets her have it in the end, releasing the toy so she can drag it off to her bed, gnawing it covetously. He smiles, watching her.

He should get up, start dinner, open his mail, but he stays down on the ground for a while longer. It’s just so much nicer down here.

* * *

Eventually he realizes there’s a name for it: pet play. Puppy play, if you want to get specific. Will pours himself a glass of whiskey and spends a couple hours going down that particular rabbit hole, clicking links to increasingly obscure webpages, but he doesn’t relate to any of it, really. Most of the websites he finds describe some kind of sexual component, but it isn’t that, for him. He doesn’t get off on it.

At last, he sets his empty glass down on the table and snaps his laptop shut. He doesn’t feel any particular need to delve deep into his psyche to figure out why he likes it. He just likes it, and that’s all that really needs to be said. It is what it is.

* * *

The first time Hannibal calls him _good,_ his breath catches in his throat. Hannibal notices, keen eyes taking it in. Will notices him noticing. He freezes, waiting for Hannibal’s next move. It doesn’t come. Hannibal doesn’t do anything with that particular bit of information; he just tucks it away for later.

Will knows Hannibal well enough by now—better than anyone, like the back of his own hand—to realize that it’s enough for Hannibal to know that he has it.

* * *

It gets lost in the intervening years. There’s just so much else—the gutting, the trial. It feels like such a small thing, such a small part of himself to tuck away. He shelves it along with the other parts of him that don’t fit anywhere anymore. He feels a twinge in that direction sometimes. Just as he feels a pinch of longing for _bones sprawled out, left to dry in the sun while ravens pick away at straw blonde hair and fit it in their nests; somewhere a grinning fox feasts, muzzle coated in red._

It’s not his life anymore. It’s a phantom limb, just an ache for something he never wanted but lost all the same. He scratches his dogs on the head, rubs them behind the ears, but that’s all.

He sits at the table and stares out the window and drinks.

* * *

He meets a woman. She smells like Dove soap and strawberry shampoo. She has two dogs with bright, glossy coats and a son who tucks himself behind her, burying himself in his Gameboy when Will tries to smile in his direction.

He isn’t sure if she actually doesn’t know who he is or if she just pretends, but he’s grateful for it all the same. She’s a breath of fresh air in a crowded room, a light at the end of a tunnel that keeps getting darker. He clings on for dear life, and she clings back, and he guesses that this is called love.

They date. He’s always trying to push closer, to push for more.

“Hey,” she laughs. “What’s the rush? We have all the time in the world.”

There’s a tense knot of doubt lodged in his throat, a lump that threatens to choke him.

 _We don’t,_ he wants to say. He can’t help the creeping, awful fear that something is coming for him, drawing nearer every day. Every minute he spends with her feels like a grain in the hourglass, one he won’t get back. He has no way to account for his certainty that they’re living on borrowed time.

But her hands are in his hair, and his head is in her lap, and it’s enough to quiet the gnashing, white-knuckled urgency for now.

“Marry me,” he says.

* * *

There is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He sees Hannibal again, sees him across a thick pane of safety glass. It feels like coming home to a burning building, knowing you’re going to die but feeling comforted by the familiar wallpaper even as your lungs fill up with smoke.

He doesn’t know why he thought this was a good idea.

He doesn’t know why he thought he was exempt, the sole body free from the law of gravity, as if Hannibal wouldn’t immediately drag him back into orbit, the both of them circling around each other in a danse macabre.

They both say things. He doesn’t really keep track of them, too busy looking at the familiar crinkle at the edge of Hannibal’s eye, the twist of his lip when it turns down in impatience.

_Was it good to see me, Will?_

He walks back to his car and closes the door. The hammering of his heart sounds so loud.

* * *

He’s never going to ask for it. The less said about it—about any of it—the better, really. He’s here, isn’t he? He’s here, and he’s staying, so he really doesn’t see what more Hannibal could want.

The days trickle by. They turn into weeks, and they all slip through his fingers.

He and Hannibal share a bed, but only in the strictest sense of the word. Their sleep schedules are so different. With nowhere to be, Will has let his own unwind until it’s out of step with the rest of humanity. He goes to sleep when he’s tired, which is as likely to be during daylight hours as when it’s night. They’re never in bed at the same time.

He wonders vaguely if it bothers Hannibal. If it does, he hasn’t seen fit to say anything about it. Will wonders if he will, eventually. He wonders how long either of them will be content to be nothing more than two ships passing in the night, existing in limbo. He wonders if it’s possible to build a life like this, wonders that part of him wants to.

They pass close together sometimes, so close that their hulls might brush.

Hannibal is still in bed when Will decides he’s tired of being awake even if he isn’t properly tired. He’s sitting up reading something on his tablet, and Will closes the door quietly so as not to bother him. He gets into bed without a word, lying on top the covers with all his clothes on. Hannibal reaches out to rest a hand on Will’s stomach, stroking it absently while still flicking through pages with his thumb.

Will studies the side of his face for long seconds before deciding that his inattention is genuine, which makes this fine.

He closes his eyes and drifts toward sleep, only waking at the sensation of Hannibal tugging him closer. The tablet is resting on the nightstand, and the shadows in the room have moved. Will grumbles but goes, letting Hannibal reposition him so his head is resting in the other man’s lap.

“May I?” Hannibal asks, fingers lingering at the hem of Will’s shirt.

He nods.

Hannibal rucks his shirt up to gain access to his belly, and Will allows it, turning his face into Hannibal so he doesn’t have to look at him. It takes away some of the pressure, the discomfort of light shining in his eyes. He presses his nose hard into Hannibal’s stomach, enjoying the fleshy give, the evidence that Hannibal is human after all. He smells like sweat and musk, and Will breathes it in.

He sucks in a breath at the first contact of skin on skin. Hannibal lays his big palm flat on Will’s belly. He doesn’t move it, just holds it there. Will can feel someone’s heartbeat at the place where their bodies meet. He’s conscious of the ways he’s laid bare, the soft, tearable parts of him exposed to the light.

Hannibal smooths his hand down, stopping when he reaches the edge of Will’s pants. He picks up his hand and does it again.

Little by little, Will relaxes. He lets go of the tension and lets himself drift. He floats on, thinking of nothing until Hannibal’s voice calls him back.

“You never asked me for this,” he says.

“I never asked anyone for it.”

“Your wife.”

“Guessed, yeah. She didn’t mind.”

“Did you expect that I would?”

Will shrugs. “Doesn’t exactly seem like your wheelhouse.”

They’re quiet for a time. Will pulls his face out of Hannibal’s shirt to look at him. They owe each other honesty, he guesses. That, if nothing else.

“I didn’t think you would mind. I just don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want you to analyze it.” He nuzzles his nose back into Hannibal’s side. “Just let it be something that is.”

Hannibal’s hand skims over the skin of his belly and comes to a halt just _there._ Will can feel fingers running over the ridge of his scar. He tenses. He feels a phantom ache, an echo of blood.

“Does it frighten you when I touch you here?” Hannibal asks.

Will sucks in a breath, forces every muscle in his body to unclench, to stop tensing to run. “A little.”

Hannibal doesn’t exploit the weakness. He returns to rubbing Will’s stomach, pressing with a firmness that makes Will sigh. He closes his eyes and tips his chin up, letting his thighs fall further apart. Hannibal’s hands don’t wander except to brush through the sparse patch of dark hair scattered in a line down his belly.

It’s sweet and relaxing. He lets himself be soothed.

“Do you want anything else from me?” Hannibal asks.

“Not right now,” Will murmurs with his eyes still closed.

“What a good dog you are,” Hannibal murmurs. “So strong and handsome. How lucky I am to have found you.”

Will sighs and quietly agrees. He is a good dog.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
